Patches (Natural Selection 2)/Build 208
Released May 17, 2012 Changelog Alien Commander love *Fixing the alien commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up. *Cysts and Drifters cost energy *Hives don't start with any Drifters *Tweaked Hive, Harvester, upgrade structures, hydra and egg maturation times (generally shorter) *Reduced cyst connection range somewhat *Increased Drifter move speed to make them feasible near combat *Hives can be dropped without needing infestation (to allow fast expansion) *Added Enzyme Cloud - a new Drifter ability which allows the Commander to cast a cloud into battle which speeds up the rate of fire for all aliens inside it *Simplified alien commander UI Balance *Think I overcompensated with mature harvester health (now it's +10% instead of +20%) *Bumped up harvester and Hive health to be closer to NS1. *Changed Bile Bomb damage to 55 and increased splash damage radius to 6. *Reduced energy cost for Gorge abilities to make him more responsive and interesting. Changes *Improved Gorge bellyslide *Removed mini-cysts because they were confusing and redundant with regular Cysts (they also tended to break cyst chains when the Gorge died) *Nutrient mist now affects single target *Gorges can now build structures off infestation *The outgoing voice volume is louder. *Updated Drifter tooltip text. *Reduced player FOV used to detect other players for the minimap. *Touching enemy cloaked unit will now uncloak them. *Med/ammo packs cost now Command Station energy. *Unbuilt structures start now with an armor fraction (was health fraction only before) *Increased jetpack maneuverability and removed backwards flying penalty. *The Axe will now show a crosshair hit indicator. *Cysts / Hives generate now infestation on walls and ceilings. *Shade cloak is now a passive ability and requires no energy. *Players can no longer get cloaked by shades. *Ammo/med packs cost now armory energy. *Gorge structures won't die anymore when the owner Gorge enters the Hive. *Infestation does not grant LOS anymore (won't generate Hive sight / minimap blips) *Decreased 'randomness' of Shotgun. (predefined bullet spread pattern that rotates randomly around the players view axis) General Fixes *Smoothed out skulk movement (removed hyper responsiveness when landing on ground, changed sticky force to depend on wall normal) *The health will no longer display on the Welder for unsocketed Power Points. *Fixed bug where key the backward and right keybindings would be correct when first running the game. *Make sure LeaveMenu is called when exiting out of the main menu. *Properly deactivate and activate mods when updating them. Fixed refreshing of the mod list so that it refreshes the list of all subscribed mods as well as all downloaded-but-not-subscribed mods. *Fixed bug where unpack was called on a table with holes when notifying the Marine of new upgrades (can lead to unpredictable results) *Fixed memory leak when removing a source from the file system. *Fixed a rare bug where sometimes an Alien player would not be able to spawn after a Hive was killed. *Fixed problem were ARC continues charge up effect after losing LOS. *Added shade minimap icon. *Fixed bug where spectator camera flips when looking straight up/down. *Raised arc splash damage origin a bit to fix problems with tiny ledges at the ground. *Command Stations show now correctly a range indicator when you attempt to drop an Infantry Portal. *Fixed bug that allowed you to use shadow step while stabbing. *Disabled jetpack smoke trail effects for the local player which were causing FPS problems. *Fixed bug where nano shield/construct trigger sounds where played at the Command Station instead of target position. *Fixed initial infantry portal floating. *Fixed crash when calling RenderMaterial.GetLayer with an invalid index (now generates a script error) *Fixed bug which allowed you to place mines on clogs. *Fixed a bug that caused the Fade to occasionally get stuck when blinking. *Fixed a bug which allowed you to drop a Command Station on an infested techpoint. *Fixed issue where hot loading script would cause errors due to mixins being recreated. *Fixed bug where blend times for the animation graph did not take into account the speed of the animation. *Fixed potential crash bug when sending strings as part of network messages. *Fixed crash when a font couldn't be rendered due to the system being out of video memory. *Various crashes related to collision objects being destroyed. *Fixed bug where nutrient mist was not correctly affecting researches. Improvement *Reduced network traffic regarding minimap blips. *Improved spit effect. *Sped up heal spray by 34% to make more responsive (adjusted energy cost and healing correspondingly) *Fixing the Alien Commander economy so the player must make a trade-off between attacking, expanding and teching up. *Marine way point lines are now color coded (red: attack, green: defend) Optimization *Reduced the number of times pose parameters were updated for a model. *Reduced the overhead of accessing a member variable from script. *Reduced the amount of animation code that is executed on the Client. *Decreased amount of bandwidth needed for each player a bit. *Disable PhysX visualization unless debug draw enabled. SDK *Fixed issue where materials in the Viewer did not properly receive the time parameter. *Fixed hot loading in the Viewer. *Fixed crash when Undoing a Copy and Paste operation in the Editor. *Added the ability to speed up an animation in a model_compile file by including speed after the animation name. *Added a simple implementation of GetRandomPointsWithinRadius in Pathing code. Sound *Hive rooms now have an alien rainforest sound in them. *Extended the distance you can hear active Extractors *Hooked up various MAC sounds. category:Patches